I really need to get into editing. I hate doing it, and my computer is old and shitty so it asks patience of me that I've not been able to give. I succumbed to temptation on cyber Monday, though, and got a 6D with a big ass-printer so if I don't get into doing that I'm going to be quite the money-parted fool. The Canon software so far has been clunky and confusing, and the greatest feature, wi-fi, so far has managed to upload 13 of the thousand (literally) pictures I've tried to upload to the computer. (After it disconnects I just take the card out the old-fashioned way.)

I haven't shot anything I'm even remotely proud of, but I'll look for a picture I can at least share. The menus and features are many and I'm far from understanding how to drive the camera. Up till this I've had a 20D, 30D, and 5D and those are all basically the same in-camera software.

Here's my friend fixing his motorcycle (almost) all by himself!

What did you bring the book I didn't want read out of up for?"MAN YOUR WAY TO ANAL!" (An actual quote from another forum. Only four small errors from making sense.)

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.- Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (14 Jan 1875-1965)

Well, the new camera is working towards making me happy. I'm still considering the possibility that I'd be better off with a used 1D IV, though. For some reason it's hard for me to rationalize my poor decisions...

What did you bring the book I didn't want read out of up for?"MAN YOUR WAY TO ANAL!" (An actual quote from another forum. Only four small errors from making sense.)

So this Xmas I got some photography equipment, namely some lights, tripods, and a light shed with various backgrounds, and I tried my hand at my most challenging subject - my jungle carpet python Tindalos. I've photographed him before, but capturing the true intensity of his yellows has always proved elusive. These are definitely a step in the right direction, but still aren't quite yellow enough - the alligator skull he's on should be slightly yellowed rather than pure white, for instance. I think I'll try again when he's done shedding and eating later this week.

Mokele wrote:So this Xmas I got some photography equipment, namely some lights, tripods, and a light shed with various backgrounds, and I tried my hand at my most challenging subject - my jungle carpet python Tindalos. I've photographed him before, but capturing the true intensity of his yellows has always proved elusive. These are definitely a step in the right direction, but still aren't quite yellow enough - the alligator skull he's on should be slightly yellowed rather than pure white, for instance. I think I'll try again when he's done shedding and eating later this week.

Nice shots! It must be fun to have such a great subject living with you.

On the colour stuff, as long as you're shooting in RAW I find colour stuff to be more usually a post-processing issue rather than an in-camera one.

First of all - have you calibrated your monitor? If not I'm afraid there's very little point in fine colour adjustments - you can get it looking right on your monitor, but it won't look right on anyone else's monitor, and it won't look right when printed. If you know other photographers, or are part of a photography club you can borrow one, otherwise you will need to buy a monitor calibrator - I use this one. I resisted getting one for a while, because it seemed like an extravagant expense, but it really is necessary if you want to do accurate colour work.

Secondly, are you most interested in "true to life" colours, or do you just want it to be visually pleasing? If you want true-to-life colour the best way is to get yourself a neutral gray card and use it to set a custom white balance for your lighting set-up. If you just want something which looks good you can get away with adjusting the white balance by hand afterwards.

Finally - what do use for post-processing? Personally I think you can't do better than lightroom + photoshop*, but if that isn't in your budget or worth the money for you there's GIMP for editing, which does everything that most people need (personally I can't get over the lack of adjustment layers in GIMP, but that's me being spoiled by photoshop) and the camera manufacturers usually provide good software for RAW conversion to owners of their cameras.

*In fact these programs are the only reason I still have a windows box.

Quercus wrote:Nice shots! It must be fun to have such a great subject living with you.

Thanks! They're great animals, quite active and alert. Unfortunately, that activity makes it hard to get them to sit still; I didn't even get any good, whole-body shots of Carcosa (Tindalos' future mate) because she refused to sit still for even a second. Tindalos, on the other hand, still has the youthful nippy attitude of his species (he'll calm down eventually), so while he would hold still, it was only because he was glaring viciously at me; there was a literal cost in blood to get these photos.

Quercus wrote:First of all - have you calibrated your monitor? If not I'm afraid there's very little point in fine colour adjustments - you can get it looking right on your monitor, but it won't look right on anyone else's monitor, and it won't look right when printed. If you know other photographers, or are part of a photography club you can borrow one, otherwise you will need to buy a monitor calibrator - I use this one. I resisted getting one for a while, because it seemed like an extravagant expense, but it really is necessary if you want to do accurate colour work.

Wow, I did not know that. I sort of just assumed that monitors were calibrated at the factory and stayed that way. Thanks for the head's up!

Is there a cheaper, "manual" way to do this? Like holding up the grey card while manually adjusting the monitor?

Quercus wrote:Secondly, are you most interested in "true to life" colours, or do you just want it to be visually pleasing? If you want true-to-life colour the best way is to get yourself a neutral gray card and use it to set a custom white balance for your lighting set-up. If you just want something which looks good you can get away with adjusting the white balance by hand afterwards.

Thanks! I was trying a crude replicate of that by using the slightly-off-white gator skull on the black background, so that the gator skull would "warn" me if I was over- or under-saturating in yellows.

I'm mostly interested in true-to-life colors, partially just out of desire for accuracy, but also for marketing the future Tindalos x Carcosa offspring. Jungle carpet pythons have been selectively bred (including frequent integrades with related sub-species) to intensify and "clean up" the black and yellow they have in the wild. Being able to accurately represent how amazing these two are in person via the internet may give me an advantage in selling their offspring over the more common ad structure of "here's a crappy iPhone shot, but they look better in person!" (as well as being a more honest and genuine portrayal). Plus, the babies are always just light & dark brown, and only reach adult coloration around 2 years old, so decisions are pretty much made on the basis on photos of the sire & dam and bloodlines.

Given that these photos will be viewed by people with un-calibrated monitors, do you think it would still be a good idea to keep the gator skull + black background theme, as a way to give people with uncalibrated monitors a way to judge how the color is distorted?

Quercus wrote:Finally - what do use for post-processing? Personally I think you can't do better than lightroom + photoshop*, but if that isn't in your budget or worth the money for you there's GIMP for editing, which does everything that most people need (personally I can't get over the lack of adjustment layers in GIMP, but that's me being spoiled by photoshop) and the camera manufacturers usually provide good software for RAW conversion to owners of their cameras.

I actually use Corel Photopaint, largely because it's what I learned on, but it can handle RAW and has a bewildering array of color adjustment and image processing methods.

Thanks for the advice; I'm making a concerted effort to try to build up my photography skills, bit by bit, as I can afford to.

I recommend following this link http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ to get a decent manual calibration for your monitor. While you can't know how miscalibrated your viewers' screens will be, it's best to start at a reasonable point.

speising wrote:I recommend following this link http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ to get a decent manual calibration for your monitor. While you can't know how miscalibrated your viewers' screens will be, it's best to start at a reasonable point.

Oooh, nice ones. Low light/long exposure is one of things I'd like to try out more.

Speaking of trying out, I decided that I want to get into studio photography, so I've gotten myself a starter kit (couple of flashes, softboxes and background) and have done a few shoots with friends to get my bearings. So far I've been getting promising results (and the shoots themselves are a lot of fun to do). These are all from a shoot I did with Anne last sunday.

Had a bit of trouble with the flashes. I have one transmitter/receiver (radio signal) that triggers the main flash, then the others (I have two more) are set to slave, which means they'll flash when they detect a flash. But the room we were using is south-facing, couldn't really be darkened and on a sunny afternoon that means there isn't always enough contrast between the ambient light and the flash to actually trigger the slaves. I think next time I'll set up the black cloth backdrop that came with the starter set to cover as much of the windows as possible while using the replacement paper backdrop for the shoots. I had used the cloth one on the first shoot that I did and quickly realized that using that would mean ironing it before every shoot...

Wow, that's a nice shot for a 6 year old - that kid of yours has potential. Assuming he stays interested in photography make sure you get him a camera with manual controls at some point, so that he can develop the technical side of it as well.

measure wrote:These are some of my older ones--I haven't had a camera around recently.

Your links aren't working. First and foremost, I don't think the IMG tags work unless your URL contains a image filetype (i.e. .jpg, .png, .gif, etc.). Second, I'm getting a 403 error when I try to open the link in a new tab.

In other news, I went on a hike yesterday:

Bright and sunny down by the beach, but we got some nice orographic lift producing some clouds at the ridge.

measure wrote:These are some of my older ones--I haven't had a camera around recently.

Your links aren't working. First and foremost, I don't think the IMG tags work unless your URL contains a image filetype (i.e. .jpg, .png, .gif, etc.). Second, I'm getting a 403 error when I try to open the link in a new tab.

Whizbang wrote:Here is one I took two years ago with my phone that Facebook reminded me of today.

Oooh nice one! I like how you got a full frontal display from him.

Here's some of my latest studio photography efforts:Anne by hans905, on Flickr(there's some jpg artifacting going on in the background with the smaller versions that Flickr generates by itself, that's not present in the full-size one)

I found a Nikon lens cap on the retaining wall at Laguna Seca a couple years ago. I finally had to go get a holder for it. (I've hated using Canon lens caps, but they're finally coming around to making ones you can reach.)

What did you bring the book I didn't want read out of up for?"MAN YOUR WAY TO ANAL!" (An actual quote from another forum. Only four small errors from making sense.)

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.- Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (14 Jan 1875-1965)

So I finally processed all my photos from Iceland. Took about 60 GB worth over 10 days. Amazing scenery, lovely people, dang I want to live there, ha! Would go back, A++. My album of all the shots are here: https://flic.kr/s/aHsky4edWh